


The fastest way to know a man's heart

by Mythril (fantacination)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: A little Heith if you squint, Food means different things to Team Voltron, Gen, Hunk POV, I actually love that Hunk loves food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 04:19:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11051193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fantacination/pseuds/Mythril
Summary: ...is through his stomach. Food keeps going missing and Hunk investigates.





	The fastest way to know a man's heart

It was little stuff that went missing. 

Hunk wasn’t about to go pointing fingers-- after all, there were nights when he’d get peckish himself and whip something up in the middle of the night without telling anyone. So a couple of handfuls of alien berries vanishing from the table or a couple of missing boxes from the pantry wasn’t really a big deal.

He hadn’t expected it to be an ongoing thing: a blue apple here and a cube of seaweed there. It wasn't long before he started wondering who was doing it. Nobody seemed like they’d suddenly got an increased appetite, too busy worrying about family or brooding while staring at fields of stars. For a few days, he thought it might be the mice. 

Then he baked a pie. It was a  _ great _ pie, too, with a crisp, flaky crust of blue-whatever-flour and those sweet, salty PBJ-looking berries inside, floating on an improvised meringue of goo and sticky purple sweet molasses. 

It wasn’t as though he wasn’t going to share, but someone had very clearly taken a slice before it had properly cooled, upsetting the crust and leaving a trail of still-warm filling droplets. 

“Oh I have you now,” Hunk declared to the room at large, following the trail like a sleuth on the trail of stolen berry diamonds. He’d have his pie thief at the end, he was sure of it. 

His best bet was Lance- he’d never been able to wait for good food. Having him around the kitchen meant whacking his fingers with a spoon if he had to defend the food before it was ready. He loved taste-testing things, although he usually didn’t bother sneaking away to eat it. He was utterly complacent about being caught red handed ruining his appetite. 

Pidge was always working on something and often forgot to eat- it wouldn’t be out of place for her to have wandered in for an absentminded snack or two and code-walk her way back to her nest. Maybe she'd even notice what she was eating in time to keep from biting into any tech. 

He couldn’t imagine Shiro being anything but polite-- but he also never saw Shiro eat a lot. Only what was set before him. That always worried him, a little. Shiro was a big guy and he obviously needed feeding to keep his strength up. He seemed to eat only what he knew he needed, nothing more or less. Seeing someone enjoy food so  _ little _ had been disheartening. He wondered, sometimes, what went on in Shiro’s head when the team wasn’t around to distract him. 

Allura, he knew, secretly adored sweets. She would’ve had very little trouble taking a slice for herself. But she would’ve taken it on a plate, maybe with some of that strange blue Altean tea. She'd have taken a tray, though, and maybe a smaller slice for the mice.

So it was with confusion that he trailed the pie all the way into the training deck. 

Hunk blinked as he entered the room. It took turning around before he spotted him, perched on the railing that ringed the observation deck, his fingers sticky with purple meringue. 

“Keith!  _ You  _ took the pie!” 

“Not all of it!” Keith said defensively, looking abashed. “Was…. was it special or something?” 

“Was it you taking the other stuff, too?” 

Keith frowned. “What? Oh. You… mean the snacks?’ 

“Yeah, it’s okay, I was just wondering,” Hunk clarified. “I mean, I know you get hungry too, man, we all do.” 

Two little packets rained down on Hunk’s head. They were of the strange Altean biscuits from the stores- bland, but edible. 

“Dude, I think my cookies are offended.” Hunk’s tastebuds could appreciate a lot, but the blandness and texture of the biscuits was kind of like cardboard. Not that Coran or Allura seemed to get the reference. 

Keith flushed- it was a tiny thing, a quick little dash of color against his cheeks. “I… I don’t eat them.” 

“You don’t? What do you do with them? Play cards?” That was a bit wasteful, but not a  _ bad _ use, per se. Alteans didn’t exactly have a lot of available forms of entertainment. It seemed like they spent all their time being… not at home. Which, he privately thought, kind of explained the food. 

“I...keep them. For rations,” Keith explained slowly, his quiet voice was more low than soft. But it still felt like a secret, somehow. “Around my room, I mean.” 

“Oh,” Hunk said, stalling. He didn’t really know how to talk to Keith- he seemed pretty okay, but there was always something…. off.  Like Keith had skipped a few too many things in life. He’d felt the way Keith kept others at a distance, as if he didn’t know what to do with people, either. He skirted gingerly around anyone who wasn’t Shiro, with their mysterious past, or Pidge, with her total apathy for anything that didn’t have circuitry or was her family. 

When he’d hugged Keith, he’d felt like he was made of glass. Palladium glass, maybe, but brittle, Prince Rupert's drop teetering on a delicate tail. It was kind of silly, he guessed, since Keith had always been so  _ strong _ . Always at the top of every chart. Always the topic of Lance’s rants. The real deal, he’d found, was quiet and a little intimidating. 

“So, uh, why? If you’re not going to eat them, I mean.”

“It’s nothing. Forget about it,” Keith said, dropping down from his perch in a light little hop that Hunk envied a little. Keith’s casual athleticism had always shown through in everything he did. 

“No, hey, sorry, I mean, I sneak out to get food but if I could get goo to stay fresh I’d totally bring some with me to bed.” Hunk gave Keith a broad grin. “Everyone snacks. Nothing to be ashamed of.” 

“I guess,” Keith said a bit dubiously. “I just… you ever think about how we could get stranded anywhere, anytime? We’re in a 10,000 year old ship, at least. It’s lightyears ahead of anything we have but what if it just breaks down?” 

“Well now I have,” Hunk whined.

Keith didn’t smile. “I just…  I want to be ready if we had to make our own way.” 

Hunk sobered quickly. “Well, hey, it’d be okay. Everyone’s here. We’re all in the same wing and Coran is really good- I know you guys don’t talk much but he’s seriously got a great head for engineering stuff- he brushes it off most of the time, but he knows how everything’s supposed to work- keeping a Castle like this running with just one guy is amazing.”

“If anything happened, we’ll handle it. Team Voltron, right?” Hunk tried to smile comfortingly.

Keith blinked up at him, startled. It was hard to remember how  _ short _ Keith was, too. He wasn’t that much shorter, even if Lance begged to disagree, but he was also such a larger than life presence that Hunk had  always thought he’d be taller. 

“I… I guess so.” He looked down.

Keith, Hunk realized slowly, always ate like he was ravenous, like the food might run off the table. He never complained about flavor and he had stomached even Coran’s most adventurous disasters. And suddenly, Hunk remembered, Keith had been living alone. In a desert shack with hardly anything more than a couple of cans of beans, dusty. He thought about how thin Keith was, whipcord lean muscles under his skin with hardly anything to pad it out with. He hadn’t been in a good place. Not for a long time. 

But there shouldn’t ever be a reason for someone to go hungry when Hunk had a stocked kitchen and a lifetime growing up in a family where food was a love letter. Food was home. It was being called to set the table with the scent of roast and herbs wafting through the house. It was fresh baked cookies when he got home from school and chicken soup in bed. Keith… had never had any of those, and it showed. 

“Hey.” Hunk said, “I kind of still have a bunch of berries. You wanna help me bake the next pie?” 

Keith blinked slowly. “I… uh, I’m not much for baking. I pretty much just roast anything I find.” 

“Well, it’s not  _ easy _ , but I’ll teach you!” Hunk grinned. “Not for the faint-hearted, though. Baking’s serious business. But you’re up for it, right?’ 

Keith paused, then nodded cautiously, like he wasn’t entirely sure if Hunk was feeling okay. But Hunk was a lot more patient than Lance was. Sometimes, it felt like a superpower. 

“Yeah, okay. Sorry about the one I ate." 

“Was it good?” Hunk prompted.

“It was,” Keith said honestly. “Everything you make is,” he confessed.

“Then we’re good.” Hunk beamed and led the way back. 

**Author's Note:**

> I know Hunk has a lot of food jokes, but I kind of also can't stop thinking about how food means different things to people. And so this happened.


End file.
